the lost princess

Previously

…Aurelia looked down at the pendant, its faint light a beacon in the deepening twilight. The riddles, the fragmented dreams, the unsettling sense of being more than she appeared – it all coalesced into a potent, undeniable truth. She was not simply Aurelia, the girl who lived a quiet life in the village. She was something else. Something more. And the shadows that Lord Valerius spoke of, the ones that stirred with the fading light, felt all too real. The encounter had not brought answers, not truly, but it had brought a profound shift, a turning point. The river, she knew with a certainty that settled deep in her bones, was about to break its banks once more.